Free to err

It's natural selection; leave them to them kill themselves if that's what they want to do. The sooner the better.

I just put an antenna on my roof that gets over 20 HD channels, installed MythBuntu on an old PC, and dropped my cable tv completely. By scheduling recordings from the air, I'll have more than enough to watch whenever I want without paying any of them any money and they'll have to live off their advertising like in the bad old days. Oh yeah, and I can skip commercials.

Luckily for now what I'm doing is not only perfectly legal but they are mandated to provide it. Keep your eyes on the small print in those obscure bills from the back benches - we're sure to see some concerted effort to kill free-to-air broadcast.

Au contraire, I think it's fitting that if Sony doesn't want to pay up, they should have to go through each frame and replace all incidental art with something generic, just like WKRP did for syndication. They can't have it both ways.

Re: A wonderful sentiment--- if it were true

The "blue sky essay" part of my post was preceded by the following line which Mike didn't include in his quote.

"This is what it’s all about, from a pure philosophical perspective:"

Perhaps even without this preface, you feel that an attempt to express something with philosophical purity equates to wild-eyed optimism.

My goal was not to dismiss the entire real world of pragmatism but to provide a distilled definition of the problem domain and then begin a discussion, which I'm happy to see it has.

Apparently my choice of the qualifier "not too much different from" was not enough to deflect analogy-pedantry. I grant that the problem has little to do with forest-clearing machinery and Brazilian mob rule. Touché.

wooden horses

An observer of the gradual constitution-weakening legal and procedural assertions of the last decade or more might well wonder whether the "unintended consequences" of which you speak are in fact the payload of such a broadly painted gift-horse.

Re:

I hereby express concern as a Canadian and owner of a Canadian company who is not named Michael and is not a crony of any Michaels nor a purveyor of artificial turf. You are now free to drop your shield of incredulity and consider our side of the argument.

Threat level scarlet

SOPA is NOT censorship. Let me be clear - America does not Censor!

We all have to realize that we can only win the war on Infringerism by accepting that Enhanced Internet-Abrogation Techniques are a necessary and effective method to control those who hate us for our creativity.

Congress should expand their search for systems that need dismantling or breaking up due to bigness. Take their own two political parties for instance. Not enough competition. If one goes out of business all you'll have is the other one.

Every picture, every expression, every thought is naturally born into the public domain.

Copyright (similarly to patents) is an artifice introduced by humans to alter the natural course of free and open knowledge transfer. In order to accord benefit to the product's creator, they are provided with a legal construct which allows them to restrict other humans' use of their product and demand compensation.

Nobody *owns* the right to copy. They temporarily hold the right to restrict other humans' behaviour with respect to their product.

ownership vs copyright

Copyright is an oddly fitting glove for a foot such as this. There seems to be some conflation between copyright and ownership and the waters are very murky.

I'm struggling to grok how if I as a code monkey click the shutter button on your camera, I have extended control over the resulting image that's on your memory card. If you never choose to do anything with that image or to send it to me, would I have a right to demand it from you? If you copy that image from your memory card to your computer and print it out or post it, do I have some magical dominion over your ongoing behaviour? If it were a film camera where you actually paid for the film that my click caused to be exposed, and you had to pay to process the film, would things be any different?

I'm inclined to say that it's his camera, he owns the pics on it. The person who took the pic should get credit for taking it and perhaps share in ownership somehow, but I have a feeling that somehow it crosses some line to give that person full ownership and control.

Finally! Apple, EMC, Microsoft, RIM, Ericsson & Sony have been languishing too long without any impetus to innovate. These patents will at last enable them once and for all to promote the heck out of the progress of Science and useful Arts. Huzzah!